Syntax Colloquium 25.01.2021 – Nelly Kerezova and Melissa Jeckel & Anke Himmelreich

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
Dear colleagues, we are very happy to announce the next session of our syntax colloquium, which will again host two talks. Nelly Kerezova will talk about "Null objects in European Portuguese" and Melissa Jeckel & Anke Himmelreich will discuss "Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in the World’s Languages". Titles: "Null objects in European Portuguese" (Kerezova); "Agreement with Coordinated Subjects in the World’s Languages" (Jeckel & Himmelreich) Time  : 25.01.2021, 4 - 6 pm Place : Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) You are all, as always, cordially invited! All the best, Johannes...
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Talk by Muyi Yang (UConn)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Muyi Yang (UConn) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Iffy if: Japanese moshi in conditionals and related constructions Date: January 21 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Across languages, conditional antecedents can often be marked by elements that signal the speaker's sense of "iffiness" about the antecedent proposition, such as English if (von Fintel and Iatridou 2002), German falls (Hinterwimmer 2014)  and sollte (Sode and Sugawara 2019). This talk concerns Japanese moshi, a marker in conditional antecedents that has been traditionally described as a signal of supposition. I will first investigate the distribution of moshi in various types of conditionals such as factual conditionals and unconditionals, and show that the iffiness expressed by moshi has to do with whether the antecedent proposition is in the common ground. I will propose a presuppositional account of moshi, and further extend the analysis to capture its use...
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Syntax Colloquium 18.01.2021 – Annika Draudt

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
Dear colleagues, we are very happy to announce a second talk for the next session of our syntax colloquium this term. Annika Draudt (Frankfurt) will talk about "Possessives and Demonstratives in Swedish Noun Phrases". The talk will take place online, please see the information below on how to participate. Title: Possessives and Demonstratives in Swedish Noun Phrases Time : 18.01.2021 Place: Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) Note that in this session of the colloquium, we will have two talks. The talk by Annika Draudt will be preceded by a talk from Viktor Köhlich. Please find the abstract below. You are all cordially invited! =============== In this talk, I present the topic of my master thesis. My thesis deals with possessives and demonstratives in Swedish noun phrases from a nanosyntactic perspective. There are two main problems that I am...
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Syntax Colloquium 18.01.2021 – Viktor Köhlich

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next talk in our syntax colloquium this term. Viktor Köhlich (Frankfurt) will talk about "Direct and Indirect  Modification in Japanese and the Japanese Word Class System". The talk will take place online, please see the information below on how to participate. Title: Direct and Indirect Modification in Japanese and the Japanese Word  Class System Time : 18.01.2021 Place: Zoom (If you are not a regular member of the syntax colloquium and if you would like to listen to this talk, please contact Katharina Hartmann. You will be sent a link / ID to Zoom.) Please find the abstract below. Your are all cordially invited. =============== In this talk, I will present the main ideas of my dissertation project. This project deals with the questions how prominent direct nominal modification is in Modern Standard Japanese and which elements act as exclusively direct modifiers. My goal is to defy the prevailing claim in the literature that Japanese lacks direct modification entirely. Embedding Japanese into the cartographic framework,...
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Talk by Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Jeremy Kuhn (CNRS) at the Semantics Colloquium. Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts. Title: Boundaries in space and time: Iconic biases across modalities Date: January 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In cognition, spatial and temporal boundaries have been theorized to be central to humans' perception of objects and events. In language, a related semantic property has characterized the mass/count and telic/atelic oppositions, which have been argued to be grounded in these non-linguistic conceptual representations. Intriguingly, boundarihood has also been shown to be involved in a motivated mapping in sign language: telic verbs are associated with gestural boundaries. In a series of experiments, we investigate the origin of this mapping bias. We show that non-signing subjects show an iconic bias to associate bounded forms with bounded meanings, and unbounded forms with unbounded meanings. The representations involved are abstract and domain general: the bias is found both for...
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